This post was written with Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez for the Follow the Crowd Research Blog. The post is a summary of a paper forthcoming in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2013. You read also read the full paper: The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from Remixing. It is part of a series of papers I have written with Monroy-Hern ndez using data from Scratch. You can find the others on my academic website.
Does collaboration result in higher quality creative works than individuals working alone? Is working in groups better for functional works like code than for creative works like art? Although these questions lie at the heart of conversations about collaborative production on the Internet and
peer production, it can be hard to find research settings where you can compare across both individual and group work and across both code and art. We set out to tackle these questions in the context of a very large
remixing community.
Remixing platforms provide an ideal setting to answer these questions. Most support the sharing, and collaborative rating, of both individually and collaboratively authored creative works. They also frequently combine code with artistic media like sound and graphics.
We know that that increased collaboration often leads to higher quality products. For example, studies of Wikipedia have suggested that
vandalism is detected and removed within minutes, and that high quality articles in Wikipedia,
by several measures, tend to be produced by more collaboration. That said, we also know that collaborative work is not always better for example, that brainstorming results in less good ideas when done in groups. We attempt to answer this broad question,
asked many times before, in the context of remixing: Which is the better description, the wisdom of crowds or too many cooks spoil the broth ? That, fundamentally, forms our paper s first research question:
Are remixes, on average, higher quality than single-authored works?
A number of critics of peer production, and some fans, have suggested that mass collaboration on the Internet might work much better for certain kinds of works. The argument is that
free software and Wikipedia can be built by a crowd because they are functional. But more creative works like music, a novel, or a drawing might benefit less, or even be hurt by, participation by a crowd. Our second research question tries to get at this possibility:
Are code-intensive remixes, higher quality than media-intensive remixes?
We try to answers to these questions using a detailed dataset from
Scratch a large online remixing community where
young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the
Scratch programming environment: a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the
Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the
MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million, mostly young, users.
Measuring quality is tricky and we acknowledge that there are many ways to do it. In the paper, we rely most heavily a measure of peer ratings in Scratch called
loveits very similar to likes on Facebook. We find similar results with several other metrics and we control for the number of views a project receives.
In answering our first research question, we find that
remixes are, on average, rated as being of lower quality than works of single authorship. This finding was surprising to us but holds up across a number of alternative tests and robustness checks.
In answering our second question, we find rough support for the common wisdom that
remixing tends to be more effective for functional works than for artistic media. The more code-intensive a project is, on average, the closer the gap is between a remix and a work of single authorship. But the more media-intensive a project is, the bigger the gap. You can see the relationships that our model predicts in the graph below.
Both of us are supporters and advocates of remixing. As a result, we were initially a little troubled by our result in this paper. We think the finding suggests an important limit to the broadest claims of the benefit of collaboration in remixing and peer production.
That said, we also reject the blind repetition of the mantra that collaboration is always better for every definition of better, and for every type of work. We think it s crucial to learn and understand the limitations and challenges associated with remixing and we re optimistic that this work can influence the design of social media and collaboration systems to help remixing and peer production thrive.
For more, see our full paper, The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from Remixing.
On Saturday I had the opportunity to teach another one-day master class on
I feel like i've done a lot of blogging recently about failing to do things with proprietary software. That's annoying. This post is about something i made successfully with free software (and some non-software crafting): I made a Woolly Mammoth for my nephew!
I documented 
My trusty Asus seems to have succumbed to graphic fault. I got an OS-free Zoostorm as its replacement, to avoid paying the MS tax. Zoostorm is one brand that Clevo laptops are sold under.
It was actually a Clevo 7872-9040/A built Jan 13. I installed Debian 6 on it. The download button was easy to spot on the front page, but I actually used mini.iso so I could use a smaller usb stick. The first larger stick I tried was a dud and I m not sure where other sticks went in the move.
The base installation went fine and most things went well, but the wireless networking and sound required an upgrade, but more on that next tech post.
For this prototype to be really useful, some way to automatically
install the proposed packages by pressing the "Please install
program(s)" button should to be implemented.
If this idea seem useful to you, and you want to help make it
happen, please help me update the discover-data database with mappings
from hardware to Debian packages. Check if 'discover-pkginstall -l'
list the package you would like to have installed when a given
hardware device is inserted into your computer, and report bugs using
reportbug if it isn't. Or, if you know of a better way to provide
such mapping, please let me know.
This prototype need more work, and there are several questions that
should be considered before it is ready for production use. Is dbus
the correct way to detect new hardware? At the moment I look for HAL
dbus events on the system bus, because that is the events I could see
on my Debian Squeeze KDE desktop. Are there better events to use?
How should the user be notified? Is the desktop notification
mechanism the best option, or should the background daemon raise a
popup instead? How should packages be installed? When should they
not be installed?
If you want to help getting such feature implemented in Debian,
please send me an email. :)
My least favorite forecast, and we've been having a lot of it lately. Since
winter began (Dec 21st), my PV array has produced only 102 amp-hours of
power. There have been only 3 days that could be considered sunny at all
(even for a few hours). To put this in some perspective for you, Wolfram
Alpha tells me that 102 amp-hours is half of a typical car battery
capacity. So I've really had to scrimp & save. I disconnected my router to
save power, and I plumbed the depths of the battery bank (further than it's
really safe to go). And I was completely out of power for several days.
So, I've bought a generator. I had to order it online, because it seems
every store in the entire eastern US is completly out of stock, due to
hurricane Sandy. This house has a generator shed (complete with a massive
old generator that doesn't work), but I put the new, small generator in the
furthest outbuilding, from where it can only barely be heard in the house.
Later I'll be able to run a cable from its 12v terminal to charge the
battery bank (if the sun doesn't get there first); for now it only
powers my laptop. Nasty noisy smelly dirty thing, it pains me to run it.
Back to the "overcast" forecast. I've heard meterologists say that one
unexpected consequence of climate change seems to be that weather patterns
are persisting longer, giving us this summer's weeks of neverending heat,
and large, slow-moving storms. I suspect this could also explain the
blankets of clouds that have been settling in for weeks at a time, on and off
since mid-November. But I only have 2.5 years of not very good data. Before,
I paid about as much attention to whether it was sunny as anyone
else, which is to say, not really very much. Anyone know of a source of
historical cloud cover data?
A few days ago, 
Synaps
Synaps is written in around 7k lines of Python (with 28 % of which are
comments), reuses at least one common module of OpenStack
(openstack.common.cfg) and copy some modules from Nova. One thing that
strikes me, is that there seems to be only a few unit tests compared to most
OpenStack projects. Also, many parts of the code and documentation contains
text written in korean, which won't be very helpful for most people! :-)
It uses some external technologies, like 
Overlap with Heat
For now, there's not a lot of overlap with Heat, because Heat does not
implement completely the CloudWatch API. Heat actually still misses a lot of
the CloudWatch functions. But as soon as it will implement the CloudWatch
API completely, the overlap will be complete with Synaps in this regard.
One divergence point however, is that Heat uses RPC to access data from the
storage back-end via its engine (the central daemon), whereas Synaps
directly connects to Cassandra. Also, Heat relies on SQLAlchemy, like most
OpenStack projects needing a database.
Overlap with Ceilometer
One of the goal of Ceilometer is to provide data probes and pollsters for
all OpenStack components (Nova, Swift, Quantum ) whereas Synaps let the
OpenStack users to put any kind of metric inside it, and therefore doesn't
provide anything for now.
But the storage of metrics is the main common point between Synaps and
Ceilometer. Synaps chose only one technology, Cassandra, to store its
metrics, whereas Ceilometer took care of building an abstraction layer for
the storage engine. Ceilometer currently allows an operator to use SQL or
MongoDB, but Cassandra could likely be added.
Data metric consolidation is done by Synaps. This makes sense, since Synaps
don't need to have the full data history to trigger alarms. On the opposite,
Ceilometer needs to have a full history to allow things like billing, and
don't do any aggregation on data.
Also, in Synaps, the data analysis is done using Pandas. This means the data
used are retrieved from the Cassandra back-end, and then transformed by
Pandas inside Synaps in something else. It's likely that in such a case,
Synaps should use CQL to achieve that. Ceilometer manipulates the data near
their storage: it means that the computation are done by back-end to be
efficient (SQL, mapreduce ).
Conclusion
Considering Samsung open-sourced Synaps late in the development process, I
don't feel like they aimed to have it becoming a core component. This is
always sad, because the effort put into this implementation are big and it
would have probably little to add some abstraction layers to follow what
other OpenStack projects do. But this takes time and energy, and it's
understandable that Samsung didn't want to achieve this in a short time
frame.
There's a part of the code and architecture that overlaps with Ceilometer
and Heat. Ceilometer is becoming a specialized point to store data metrics
from any source: so it's sad, but understandable, that Synaps did not tried
to reuse it. Fortunately, Heat is working with Ceilometer to achieve exactly
that. This means OpenStack would have only one metrics storage point, used
for billing, for monitoring and alarming.
Therefore, I think Synaps is an implementation of CloudWatch that should be
looked at as an inspiration for Heat and Ceilometer to build a better and
more integrated solution!
A few days ago I wrote 
An interesting question popped up in my Twitter stream today is there an Android alternative to 
Favicons for Server Tabs
Distinguishing server tabs can be difficult, especially if you have plenty of
them. All server tabs have the same icon so you need to search for the right
name. I wondered why this issue doesn't happen so easily with a web browser
which usually also has lots of tabs open. Besides the page name there is the
favicon right in front. So why can't Smuxi make use of that simple but effective
technology? Well, 
Quick Join Bar
One thing that makes IRC really difficult for new comers is the important IRC
concept that channels are network specific. So what happens is people try to
find / join the channel they are looking for but on the wrong network. They
have to connect to the right server/network and then switch to the right tab,
before they can join the channel (using the /join command or join dialog). The
developers of Smuxi had a brainstorming session and came up with something that
should be easy enough for anyone to use and finally solves the issue: the
Ewww, that looks ugly, doesn't it? I will make this one short, here is the cure
with 
Enhanced Text Frontend
The text frontend which is still in alpha state has received the following
enhancements: new /exit command, new /help command, regular and xterm window
title, and, several fixed crashes.
The /connect command now allows you to 
It is usually easy to see even in a thumbnail
P.S. Got over 5k photos in Flickr now with this set, and closing in for 500k views. That feels cool